Skyrim, for all its flaws, at least had hand crafted worlds with interesting things to see and do in them

Virtually 100% of main and faction story arcs are hand-generated content. I would go further and say Starfield used more distinct model-sets than Skyrim did.

For context, Skyrim's map was ALSO procedurally generated, but most (or all) of the content was built on top of it by hand. We have comparable amount of manually generated content in Starfield, and then tons of procedural content allowing for a larger overall world.

Starfield is approximately 100,000x larger than Skyrim. So yeah, a lot of it is going to be procedurally generated. But you follow a general path, and everything along that path is NOT.

So... no fugue there. Both have similar amounts of handmade content, but Skyrim has a lot of filler content, and that filler content is largely barrel worlds, something that works because planets tend to be barren.

What is there even to find?

Granny Valentine's singing in orbit Mrs. Kurtz school field trip Space pilgrims

Just a few random orbital encounters that I've found. Planet side there are plenty of structures to explore but no real reason to do it; the random loot system ensures you're as likely to find something exploring on your own as you are fulfilling a bounty contract. There is no special reward or motivation to exploring vs finding these structures via a mission.